Good post, now where's the giveaway?

*SCNR*

We Happy Few is already GOG's best selling game. What a waste of money. Those people should be refunding the game and buying Pathologic and The Long Dark instead.

It's cheaper, they're getting two games instead of one, and whichever one of those games is way better than the procedurally-generated poor man's Bioshock survival they bought.

[EDIT] I meant "poor man's Bioshock" as a Bioshock lame knockoff, developed by a team with way less money and means than 2K Boston/Irrational Games. If you're buying We Happy Few, you're most definitely not poor; especially not when you think it's fine to spend 60 bucks on a half-baked game.

Do you know if kickstarter copies count into the bestsellers ? if yes then i can sort of see why that might be the case in an otherwise slow couple of weeks.

Anyway i mostly stay away from AAA published/Involved games nowadays except for a few with good track records and couldn't be happier, still it's a shame that scummy companies like Compulsion games, Hello Games and other like them manage to sell so well rather than many smaller developers/publishers with an eye for quality and value.

I did expect We Happy Few's price as it was discussed before somewhere that it was going to sell that high before the summer sale and based on the Dev reviews and forum postings during that time, it sort of lost appeal to me, the price made that worse, so I just bough Bioshock on HumbleBundle instead. I would consider Pathlogic but it looks to be scarier than We Happy Few and Bioshock but that may be a good thing for many people. Appreciate the suggestions. I might look into The Long Dark, though.

Especially when there was a news thread essentially warning people "The price is going WAY up, so if you want it cheap then now be the time to get it." And I'm guessing that brought on a surge of "Oh, shit!" sales at the time.

Now, it sounds more like, "Oh. Shit."

I honestly have no clue how GOG's best selling works, what it takes into account, or even how accurate it is. I'm assuming it's just based on how many people buy the game in a given period, excluding Kickstarter redeemed copies, but I could be wrong. Maybe a blue could explain this better.

As for the staying away from AAA published games, I'm exactly the same as you. In fact, I joined GOG for the oldies, but the oldies I was interested in were added to my library pretty quickly, so I stayed for the indies. And I truly believe indie and "AA" is where it's at, these days. AAA is stale and offers me nothing that I care about. Plus, AAA has an obsessive fixation with pushing graphics, and I'm stuck with a crappy laptop, so I can't even play the games they keep putting out. It all works out. I get to play actual good games out of both necessity AND choice, and I don't fall in the usual anti-consumer AAA crap.

Yep but i don't expect most people to research the games they buy because if they did shit like Hello Neighbor wouldn't have sold 500k copies in a few months or maybe it's the fault of youtubers shilling for developers and their audiences buy into it.

The cheaper EA version certainly plays a part i assume to increase sales but luckily the only time i bought into it was Factorio and Dead Cells but that was only because the overwhelmingly positive reception all over the net unlike We Happy Few who everyone was shitting on even back then and everyone called it expensive at half price and yes the quantity of content went up over time, not so much the quality.

Why the game is selling so well now though, that's the question.

@Groze, I have no idea so i took the chance and asked and yes it would be nice if a blue could answer but i don't expect anyone to see it except Linko perhaps.

Is bestselling based on copies sold or profit earned from copies sold?

That might be your answer.

Fair point, tinyE, I hadn't thought of this, I just assumed "best selling = most number of copies sold".

Then again, I always felt GOG's best selling list to be a bit... off. Or maybe I have no clue about what people want and are interested in. Because I've seen some games on GOG's front page best selling list that shouldn't have made it above the 25th mark. Dead Cells as number 1 best selling ever since it was released, sure, I can definitely see that happening, but, come on... We Happy Few gets released and a few hours later takes Dead Cell's place?! It's kind of hard to swallow, considering the kind of people who tend to buy games on GOG. Or maybe they're all way less intelligent and informed than what I give them credit for.

I want to walk around We Happy Few's world, but the reviews of the gameplay definitely mean waiting for a sale.

what happened to agency? Can someone tell me what this post was about? Was this about hating on WHF, or was it about promoting TLD and/or Pathlogic? I haven't bought WHF, and i think it looks nice, but I'd love to know why the OP is hating on it without giving anything concrete.

I used to think that, too, until huniepop changed my mind. i don't know exactly how it works, but the way huniepop, despite it's clearly lower end budget compared ot other titles on sales, and how it tends to move up and down on certain sales has showed me that it's definitely based on actual purchase data in some way. That game, for the first so many sales, had been the top seller, even over some pretty popular titles. And talking on the forums and getting people to admit the played it or bought it, it's pretty obvious that our perceptions of what the data should look like are nothing like the actual data.

Do I need to give anything concrete? I've been doing nothing more than talking about We Happy Few for the last couple of hours, whether in here or in the release thread, and even in some Steam WHF Community threads. If you want to know why the OP is "hating" on the game, I suggest you go look for the OP's posts in the GOG release thread of We Happy Few. Because the OP clearly spoke their mind in those.

As for whether I'm trying to promote Pathologic and The Long Dark: yes. I truly think they're both amazing games, and both way better than We Happy Few. Also, buying both of them is cheaper than wasting money on a clear cash grab by Compulsion Games and Gearbox Publishing. It's true that my first post was somewhat meant as sarcasm, and my intention was more to crap on We Happy Few and the way Compulsion managed the whole thing (not very well), but I do highly recommend and gladly promote Pathologic and The Long Dark.

And agency... well... I'm not forcing you or anyone else to do anything, am I? Feel free to buy the games you want; if you feel like paying AAA price for an indie game, go ahead, it's your money, it's your choice. I think it's uninformed and dumb, but I can't, won't and don't want to force you not to spend YOUR money on whatever you want. But agency goes both ways: we're also free to say what we really think about this developer, their game and the shady practices behind the whole development and publishing process. And that's all we're doing. This is no dictatorship, I have no right to tell you what to think, what to enjoy, what to do with your money. But I have the right to an opinion on the whole thing. And this is my opinion: the whole Happy Few thing is a mess, I honestly think Compulsion meant well, but they ended up botching the whole thing by getting in bed with a big-name publisher mid way through production, effectively crapping on both the Kickstarter and the Early Access/Games In Development backers and supporters, more so when the people they sign with are very much hated in the gaming world -- which was the case. My opinion is that this game is not worth 60 bucks, and that Compulsion Games overpromised and underdelivered, and they're clearly delusional if they think their game is worth the money they're asking for it. We live in a post-Witcher 3 world, and after Witcher 3, if you make people pay this much for a game, you'd better deliver something alongside Witcher 3 quality standards, which, according to the bulk of the reviews that are out there, We Happy Few clearly doesn't -- it doesn't even come close. So, yeah, I want to see these guys and their game fail. I really do. But it's not a war, and I sure as hell won't stop anyone from getting the absurdly overpriced game they want to get.

The big picture, here, is that you're making suggestions to us, but not presenting the full case. If you think we should buy something else, why would you further obligate me to investigate why rather than including that in your suggestion? I haven't read those other posts, and i feel even less inclined to, at this point. This appears much more to be a rant, except at least a rant has content.

I'm not "obligating" you to do anything. Even though I mentioned the posts where I addressed my feelings towards the whole We Happy Few situation, I did end up summarizing it all on the last (admittedly extensive) paragraph in the post you quoted. But, of course, it's just a rant -- which I never said it wasn't --, so I guess you just won't read it. Which is fine. All I'm saying is that your little "complaints" about my position on the whole thing were all pretty much addressed in that post you quoted, rant or not.

But don't feel obliged to go read it. After all, I'm the one who should be "presenting the full case" with every single post I make.